Remnants of the Khmer Rouge

30 November

Warning: this post contains some pretty depressing information and images.


Any long-term readers might remember the one other time I wrote a full blogpost for one day - my visit to Auschwtiz in Poland.

The similarities of this post are frighteningly similar.

I ended that post with reference to a plaque that requested that Auschwitz be now remembered as a "cry of despair and a warning to humanity", and an insight that this would, in all likelihood, not be heeded.

The atrocities in Poland occurred in the 1940s. Sure enough, in Cambodia in the 1970s, this warning to humanity was not heeded, as Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime ripped apart the country. In a communist movement that went well overboard, between 1975 and 1979 the regime controlled Cambodia and executed some 1-2 million of the estimated 7 million inhabitants of the country.

It is important to understand how this happened. Pol Pot - "brother number one" - and his regime believed in Cambodia being completely self-sufficient, to extreme lengths. Education was not necessary - anyone with any sort of education or intellectual background was considered a danger to the regime and was invariably executed for their trouble. This covered artists and musicians to anyone with a knowledge of a foreign language and anyone who didn't spend long enough in the fields working. People of other ethnicities, or those with connections to the former government or foreign governments, were simply "dispatched".

What amazes me is that people with these sorts of visions are able to come to power. Amazingly the Khmer Rouge were welcomed into Phnom Penh when they took over the city. When the city was emptied and its residents sent to rural areas to work, perhaps that vision changed.

The regime still held a seat at the UN until 1993, after being essentially disposed by Vietnam-backed forces in 1979. Why? They were supported by western governments in preference to the Vietnamese regime.

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There are two common sites for visitors to Phnom Penh. The first is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also known by it's Khmer Rouge reference S-21, for security prison 21.

This was set up in old school premises - which were no longer needed for their previous purpose when the new Khmer Rouge regime came to power. "Trouble-makers" came here charged under the most obscure of crimes and were invariably tortured to within inches of their lives to confess to non-existent crimes and to name other accomplices. Conditions were unbelievably dreadful. The guards themselves were not excluded, bound by strict rules, and many of them became prisoners themselves for failing to follow such rules as not leaning against a wall while on duty, or eavesdropping on interrogations.

Rules at S-21, with a present day English translation:
3. Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrocution you must not cry at all.

The school classrooms were converted into interrogation and torture rooms, and holding cells.

Interrogation room with some leftover implements. The photo on the wall was taken when the prison was first discovered by liberating Vietnamese forces: they discovered 13 bloodied corpses, just recently killed, on their arrival.

Former classrooms were converted into prison cells

The former school corridor seems a lot more sinister with barbed wire

The museum had excellent documentation of the Khmer Rouge crimes here. Rooms upon rooms full of the harrowing photos of its prisoners gave only a hint at the estimated 17,000 who passed through here in just several years - one of at least 150 in the country - before being sent to Choeung Ek for execution.

S-21 was led by a man known as Comrade Duch. After 20 years of freedom, he was arrested in 1999 and in 2009 became the only man to have faced a complete trial for his crimes against humanity as part of the Khmer Rouge regime. After an initial sentence of 35 years imprisonment, this was extended to life on appeal. Other high-ranking members have mostly died, never having faced a court for their crimes, while several members remain under arrest awaiting trial to this day.

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I took a break in a market for lunch, before heading on the dusty road out towards the Choeung Ek Memorial Centre, better known as the Killing Fields. This was where opponents of the Khmer Rouge were taken for execution, including many from S-21, as a large area to be able to dispose of victims.

Choeung Ek consists of a number of large mass graves, and an excellent audio guide has been prepared to guide visitors around the horrendous site. Stories from some of those with first-hand experience of the regime seemed all the more chilling when walking around the graves where so many of the victims were buried.

The fields containing some of the mass graves at Choeung Ek. Some still produce fractures pieces of skeletons after heavy rainfall.

Hearing stories, again and again, of how families were simply ripped to shreds by those with power... It is all very depressing. However still very important to understand why this has happened and how we can try to avoid it happening in the future. Yet still we have modern-day conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, or Nigeria - among many others.

The manner of execution also deserves note. To "save bullets", guards would carry out executions by pickaxe, or other blunt instruments. Somehow there is something a little less personal about a gunshot - having the physical capacity to attack a defenceless person to death is quite something else.

Choeung Ek Memorial Tower... Infamously filled with 5000 of the skulls discovered in the mass graves, many carrying evidence of the cruel method of their execution

For babies, even blunt instruments were often dispensed with:

"Killing tree against which executioners beat children"
... by swinging them by their feet and beating their heads against this tree.

The number of times I had to just stop and try and take it in, to comprehend what has happened here in the past... I certainly had many reasons to feel extremely fortunate for the personal situation of my life.

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As I made ready to leave the centre, a school nearby ended for the day. I could hear children laughing, playing in the grounds, enjoying the sunshine. The contrast to the emotions I was feeling was amazingly strong. But it gave me hope that perhaps, in some small ways, the "warning to humanity" at Auschwitz may, one day, be completely recognised.